December 2003
Merry Christmas!
Posted by johndilbeck on Thursday, December 25 2003 at 3:32 AM
Category: ramblings
It's time to stop working, get a few hours sleep, and then spend all day with family. I'm looking forward to seeing my daughter and her extended family this morning and my brother and his extended family this afternoon.
I hope you have the opportunity to visit with family and close friends over the holidays.
All the best to you and I hope you enjoy all of the holidays that are important to you.
Which content management system is right for me?
Posted by johndilbeck on Thursday, December 25 2003 at 3:25 AM
Category: rss_syndication
For the last week or so, I've been working with installing Coranto (the successor to NewsPro) onto DilbeckConsulting.com for managing news and other changeable information.
I've been running NewsPro for months on JohnDilbeck.com and GeorgiaDragRacing.com, and it's worked well even though it is obsolete and no longer maintained.
When I decided I wanted to find a way to syndicate news articles, by category, to some of my other websites and to any other website that wants to carry them, I went looking to see what was available.
On several of my sites, I'll be installing Coranto or updating from NewsPro to Coranto. It does what I want it to do and it's easy to use and maintain, although it is somewhat tricky to set up if you want to do anything other than the basics.
I'm going to be upgrading my Radio UserLand from version 7 to whatever the current version is over the next week or so. At this point, I'm not sure what the advantages of the new version might be, but I want to test it out.
Of course, all of this is making things complicated. Right now, I'm maintaining news and articles on JohnDilbeck.com, JohnDilbeck.com/forum/, johndilbeck.editthispage.com, johndilbeck.blogspot.com, johndilbeck.portal.dk3.com, and in my Radio UserLand blog which isn't currently being hosted anywhere. I may have several others that I've tested which aren't being maintained and, if so, I want to find a way to bring them into the system.
Eventually, I'd like to modify everything so that I can maintain a single blog with multiple categories and have the articles flow automagically to the various pages and syndicated outlets based on category selections. I'm still quite a ways away with that, but I can see how Coranto will be able to handle most of it.
Of course, with managing multiple RSS feeds and multiple static article sites, it gets quite complicated getting everything set up and working. The advantage is that it will make managing everything much easier in the future.
Building infrastructure, I am.
One goal is to have multiple websites, each with a strong theme. By selecting a category appropriate for that site's theme, or sub-theme, I should be able to send the proper information to that site. More on-theme content makes it a better site, and it will hopefully be more useful to visitors like you.
I also want to be able to choose a specific category and have it email an article to one of the many mailling lists I manage, and probably flow it into an RSS feed and/or static article page somewhere, as well.
We'll see how all this works.
The long range goal is that I'll be able to manage many sites from a central blog. Once that's working, it will be time to recruit others to write articles and have the system handle the entire news flow automagically.
In some ways, I'm a long way from that, but in others, it doesn't seem like it's going to take a lot more work on my part because the authors of the various tools I'm using have put in thousands of man-hours of work to create some fabulous tools.
Currently, I can have multiple authors editing articles on johndilbeck.editthispage.com and I've shown to my satisfaction that I can pull that newsfeed and show it here. Click on the jd-ramblings link in the News section of the menu in the right column to see it. That file is edited on johndilbeck.editthispage.com, the RSS file is parsed and converted to javascript on johndilbeck.com, and I'm using a couple of lines of javascript to show the feed on the jd-ramblings page on this site. The look of the news feed is controlled by the cascading style sheet (CSS) used on this site, so each site can present the news feeds in different ways.
One drawback to johndilbeck.editthispage.com is that I set up the account years ago and I don't know how to change my email address at the site to my current one. I'll have to look into that next week.
What I set out to do, originally, was to be able to edit information at JohnDilbeck.com, select a particular category, and then flow the information to business-residential-phone-services.com (powered by Site Build It!). Since Site Build It! doesn't have a blogging system like I want, this seemed to be the best way to send multiple streams of information to pages on that site. And, in testing, it's working although I haven't had time to actually upload the pages to that site for viewing by everyone. That'll come soon.
At the moment, I'm duplicating my efforts --several times -- but it has the potential to make things much easier for me in the future and I can compare the different systems to see which works best for me.
While many of the tools I want are already built into Manila at johndilbeck.editthispage.com, there doesn't seem to be a way to create multiple RSS feeds nor static pages there. I can do both of those things using Coranto on a traditional Unix-hosted site, and it looks like setting it up for multiple users is trivial.
We all know how much the search engines like static pages for indexing, so that is one of the things I really want, but it seems to be obviated somewhat by how well johndilbeck.editthispage.com is indexed. So static pages may not be as important as they once were.
I'm not sure what I'm going to need to do to email articles from one source to another -- such as updating my blog at blogger.com using email from somewhere else.
I don't know if I'll actually manage to have a write-once-from-a-central-location and then publish-to-multiple-destinations system worked out, but I bet it will happen in the next few weeks.
I think the UserLand products are some of the most versatile, but there are still some limitations that need to be addressed. Coranto has come a long ways from what I have been using as Newspro, and it is a strong contender.
johndilbeck.portal.dk3.com (soon to have it's own domain name) is powered by a different system and I'm far from comfortable with it at this time, but I'm seeing more and more of these sites popping up. It's just a matter of time before it finally clicks and I start grokking how to make better use of what it offers.
Which of these systems will I prefer to use? I don't know. They each have different strengths and weaknesses. It's going to be interesting to see how this develops over the next several months. It's entirely possible that I won't be able to choose one best product.
This is a lot of work for a single person working from home, but I truly believe there will be ways to leverage all of this in the future. We'll see.
Special Holiday 2-for-1 Sale! Expires December 26 at Midnght.
Posted by johndilbeck on Tuesday, December 23 2003 at 1:19 PM
Category: sitesell
Ken Evoy announced that he is running a special holiday offer. Buy Site Build It! and get two years for the price of one. Don't let this offer slip by you.
This offer expires at the stroke of midnight on the night of December 26, 2003.
See the offer at:
http://buildit.sitesell.com/sellmoreonline.html
More work with RSS and syndication
Posted by johndilbeck on Monday, December 22 2003 at 6:57 AM
Category: rss_syndication
It's been an interesting weekend.
I've had to learn more PHP programming than I really wanted to, but it wasn't so bad since it's so close to perl. I found several PHP scripts that will read an xml file and convert it to javascript output or to html. That's the syndication half of the equation.
I have several versions of John Dilbeck's Ramblings. One is on JohnDilbeck.com and is created using an obsolete, yet very useful, script called NewsPro.
The other version is hosted at johndilbeck.editthispage.com and is on a Manila server hosted by UserLand.com. Manila was the first online content management system that I learned and one of its features is that it automatically produces an xml file whenever content is added or modified.
So, now, I have two sources of the same information that has to be separately maintained. It's not a lot of work, but it does take extra time, which is more and more at a premium.
What I want to do is to edit the information once and have it available on as many sites as I want, and to make it available to anyone else who would like to syndicate it on their site.
So, now, I have a content management system at EditThisPage.com that creates the XML file and I have several scripts at JohnDilbeck.com that can read the file and output it in at least two forms.
As I was investigating NewsPro, I found that it has been resurrected and greatly improved as Coranto. The new program offers even more content managment features and, among other things, can generate an RSS XML file.
So, I installed Coranto on DilbeckConsulting.com and that's what I'm using to create this article. You can see the results at http://DilbeckConsulting.com/news/ and see both the version produced by Coranto (at the top of the page) and the version produced through syndication of the RSS XML file (at the bottom). I still have more work to do, but among the other things I did, I improved the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) so I can make the news appear as I like on any particular site.
So, will I quit using NewsPro to maintain the index page at JohnDilbeck.com and go with syndicating the information from johndilbeck.editthispage.com? Or, will I upgrade NewsPro to Coranto and continue to run two different systems? (The analyst in me, who has been trained for decades to look for points of failure, thinks it's safer to run two parallel, yet different, systems. The lazy boy in me would like to just do it once and let it flow through all the systems. I'll probably do both for awhile and see how it works.)
Regardless of what I decide to do at JohnDilbeck.com, I'm pleased with how this is working at DilbeckConsulting.com.
More as I figure all this out.
Making substantial progress with RSS syndication
Posted by johndilbeck on Saturday, December 20 2003 at 4:15 AM
Category: rss_syndication
It looks like I have this sample news feed working.
As far as I can see, it is generating a proper RSS XML file and it can be included with javascript as shown by a sample at the bottom of the page.
Note that the javascript-included sample is formatted using a style sheet. If you don't use a style sheet, it may appear differently on your site.
If you try including this on your site, please let me know if you experience any difficulties.
Experimenting with RSS and news syndication
Posted by johndilbeck on Saturday, December 20 2003 at 2:03 AM
Category: rss_syndication
For several years, I've been maintaining weblogs at JohnDilbeck.com and johndilbeck.editthispage.com and I've recently become interested in making it easy to syndicate them to other websites using javascript.
My brother maintains a blog at GeorgiaDragRacing.com, and it would be useful if it were syndicated, too.
Over the next few days, I'll be modifying the blog at JohnDilbeck.com so that it creates an rss.xml file whenever I edit it. I'll post the javascript at the bottom of the page so you can add it to your site, if you'd like.
I'll also be putting the articles into various categories so I can offer custom news feeds based on specific topics. That will probably take a couple of weeks to work out, and I'll be posting the javascript on each topic page to reproduce the articles in that topic on any page.
If you want to add one of my news feeds to your website, please email me and let me know where it is, and I'll link back to that page on your site.
Back to main news page...
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